Spotify Muscles Into Internet Radio, Makes Pandora Look Small

Pandora's catalog of 1 million songs is dwarfed by Spotify Radio's 16 million songs.

Graphic: Ryan Tate. Data: Companies.

The online jukebox Spotify announced Tuesday it will offer customized internet radio stations, putting the upstart into competition with longtime netcaster Pandora. Spotify might lack Pandora’s deep experience in online radio, but it offers listeners fully 16 times more songs to choose from. That’s a discrepency of 15 million songs, which will be tricky for Pandora to explain away.

Spotify’s new radio service apparently works a lot like Pandora: You pick an anchor artist or song, and Spotify creates a “station” that streams similar music it thinks you might like. This lets you discover new music, in contrast to Spotify’s main service, in which you find and arrange songs you already know about.

Both of Spotify’s modes, radio and jukebox, use the same gargantuan library of 16 million songs, according to a company spokesperson. Pandora, meanwhile, has just 1 million tunes in its database, putting it well behind Spotify and jukebox-only services like Rdio.

Pandora, which has been toughing it out in a tricky business for more than 12 years, says online radio isn’t about the size of your catalog so much as what you do with it. “It’s about quality, not quantity,” writes a spokesperson. “The quality of our collection is clearly illustrated by the fact that 95 percent of the songs on Pandora get played every month…. We’re trying to … provide listeners with a great personalized listening experience from any starting point they can think of in the music universe. That requires a carefully curated collection consisting of all the best music we can find from a very wide range of genres.”